One Shot Kill by Robert Muchamore Page A

section of track near the village of Lisloch.
    Eugene’s plan had involved riding the coal train fifty or sixty kilometres to wherever it got to at daybreak. Then they’d have used their wits to make their way to Paris, but they’d hoped to find themselves in a lightly-policed rural area with immaculate documentation and all their major headaches behind them.
    Rosie had no idea if she’d be able to get Edith aboard the slow-moving train on her own, she had no way of making up false documents and with a fever setting in, Edith urgently needed to see a doctor.
     
    *
     
    Rosie felt too edgy to eat, but she forced herself to nibble fruit and cheese as it grew dark.
    ‘Time to wake up,’ she said gently, as she crouched over Edith.
    The skinny body had its head resting on Rosie’s backpack. She nudged Edith several times, but nothing happened. Rosie was wary of inflicting pain and there was hardly any part of Edith that wasn’t injured, but after a third nudge Rosie grabbed Edith’s shoulder and rolled her on to her back.
    ‘We have to leave or we’ll miss the train.’
    As Edith’s body moved, Rosie felt an extraordinary blast of heat. Edith was like a little furnace. Her dress was soaking, and while Rosie didn’t have a medical thermometer it didn’t take one to see that Edith was burning up. She put her thumb against Edith’s eyebrow and slowly raised the lid. The pupil reacted to the sudden change in light but she didn’t wake up.
    Rosie found the pulse in Edith’s neck and counted fourteen beats in six seconds. You’d expect a hundred and forty beats per minute if you’d jogged a couple of kilometres, but Edith’s heart rate should have been under half that after four hours’ sleep.
    Rosie felt overwhelmed by the responsibility that had fallen on her. The trickling stream was deafening and trees seemed to loom over her like ghosts.
    Notes
    4   Gendarmes – French civilian police officers.

CHAPTER NINE
    The railway line bisected the landscape, making it easy for Rosie to find in the dark. She’d taken a single horse and ridden slowly. She was lucky not to sight trouble, because it would have been impossible to go faster with Edith slumped unconscious over the saddle behind her.
    Just after midnight a fully-laden coal train began shaking the ground Rosie sat on. It wound down the hillside at more than twenty kilometres an hour, curving around a large S, designed to ease the gradient when it climbed back up.
    Rosie squatted as close to the track as she dared. She’d imagined square-sided trucks like the wagons on her brother’s clockwork train set, but much to her relief, these wagons carried coal in V-shaped pivot-mounted skips, enabling them to be emptied rapidly by tipping. At one end each wagon had a metal platform used to access and maintain the mechanism.
    ‘I’m so thirsty,’ Edith said weakly.
    Rosie almost missed her voice over the clattering train, but dived into the trackside bushes where she was lying and allowed her to drink greedily from a canteen.
    ‘You’re doing great,’ Rosie lied, stroking Edith’s hair as she raised her head to stop her choking.
    ‘I’m seeing funny shapes,’ Edith said.
    ‘It’s the fever. You’re delirious.’
    The train seemed endless and by the time fifty coal wagons passed Edith had drifted back into unconsciousness.
    Rosie had no idea how long it would take for the train to offload and steam back, but Eugene had expected it well before sunrise. She sat beside Edith, cradling her head and envying the carefree horse munching grass a few metres away.
    It was near 3 a.m. when Rosie heard the first rumblings of the train heading back. Edith couldn’t hold on, so Rosie aimed her bag on to the platform of a passing wagon, then grabbed Edith off the grass and needed all the muscle she’d built up in training to sling her over her shoulder.
    Jumping aboard was precarious, but Rosie got a foot on a metal step and steadied herself by grabbing a metal